Who Knew He's Famous
by xSeshatx
Summary: {Oneshot} Dudley hasn't been able to stop thinking about that night where he was attacked by...he didn't know what, exactly. But he knew who he needed to ask about this, and by going to talk to his younger cousin, Harry, he learns a lot more than he intended to, but he's not complaining.


It took only a few nights for Dudley's curiosity to cloud his senses and he snuck down the hall to his second bedroom which had long since become Harry's room, if only for the summer. At first he almost knocked on the door but decided against it and instead walked right inside. Harry was laying on his bed with his eyes closed looking very much asleep, so Dudley turned to leave but Harry's voice stopped him. "What is it?" he asked, his voice sounding fully awake.

Dudley froze in his spot for a moment before slowing turning around to face his cousin who's eyes were still shut. He wondered for a few seconds if maybe Harry was talking in his sleep; Dudley didn't know enough about wizards to know what was normal for them or not. Maybe he was asleep but sensed his presence, or maybe he put a spell on the room to alert him of intruders, or perhaps Harry wasn't even there at all and that shaped that looked like him was just a curse that would jump up and kill him at any given moment. The thought had him turning to run out of the room in an instant, but again his cousin's voice stopped him.

"Honestly, Dudley, I don't know what is going on through your head right now, but whatever it is, you're wrong."

Gathering up all the courage he could muster, Dudley quietly shut the door and leaned against it as he faced Harry who now had his eyes opened and was sitting up and leaning against the wall behind his bed. "I-I just wanted to ask you about that night," he said nervously, looking away from Harry and staring at his fidgeting hands instead. He tried to think about the last time he felt this fearful and the only thing that came to mind was the night he was there to ask about.

Dudley heard his cousin sigh but didn't look up at him. He could picture the annoyed look on Harry's face perfectly, though. He got that look often enough. Of course he couldn't exactly blame his cousin for not liking or accepting him; he had done just that with him as well. Treated him like dirt as if he wasn't a living, breathing human being. Dudley wasn't used to not being liked by someone, and sometimes seeing Harry's annoyed face or hearing his sarcastic remarks tugged at something inside of him. He ignored all that for now and waited for Harry's reply which came only a few short moments later. "What, exactly, is it that you want to ask about?"

It took even longer for Dudley to form his reply, but he managed. "You told mum and dad it wasn't you who did...that. You said it was...what was it? A dementoid?"

"Dementor," Harry correctly shortly.

"Yeah, that," Dudley mumbled. "I don't remember too much from that conversation. What is a dementor?"

"Dementors are the guardians of the wizard prison Azkaban. They're one of the foulest creatures on the earth that quite literally suck all the happiness out of you until you're filled with nothing but despair," Harry explaining, and Dudley couldn't help but notice that Harry seemed to know a lot about the guardians of a prison and wonder why exactly that was. The thought only fuled his fear. What if his cousin was wanted by these things? What if Harry killed that boy he dreams about so often? Cedric, his name was. What happened while Harry was away at school that would cause those nightmares as well as those creatures to come after him? Dudley was now terrified. "What is it, Dudley? Knowing what dementors are doesn't help you out much. What do you really want to ask me?"

Before he lost his nerve, Dudley swallowed hard and forced the question out of himself. "Why are those wizard police after you? Did you kill somebody?"

The anger that passed through his cousin's face made him more afraid that he was that night, and he couldn't even see the threat that night. Perhaps he should also ask why all he saw was his cousin and not those dementors. "I didn't murder anybody, and dementors aren't 'wizard police'. I don't know why the dementors were after me. I assume it has something to do with the real murderer who is not me."

"I-I just don't understand," Dudley said in a very quiet voice as he looked up at Harry. "None of this makes m-much sense. I-I'm not like y-your kind."

"You lot aren't exactly accepting of my kind. If you were then you wouldn't be so confused."

There wasn't a whole lot Dudley could say to that because it was true. His family didn't take too kindly to Harry and therefore knew nothing of the wizarding world because they didn't care to know. But Dudley wanted to know now that it seemed to be affecting his own life and he was rightfully scared. "You mentioned someone to mum and dad. They seemed to know who he was."

"Lord Voldemort. He is a dark wizard. One of the worst wizards there are. He's murdered hundreds of people. Makes people fear for their lives. Him and his followers basically controlled the wizarding world at a point. People are so terrified of him that not many refer to him by his name and instead call him You-Know-Who. He's the one who murdered my parents."

"Why did he do that?"

Again, Harry sighed. He motioned Dudley to come take a seat and he reluctantly did. He was still terrified of Harry at the moment but he was too curious to walk away. "Voldemort set out that night to murder me. I don't know why, but I do know he failed. That's why I have this scar." He didn't need to point to it for Dudley to know what scar he meant, but he did anyways. "Something happened that night. He wasn't able to murder me. My mother gave her life to keep me alive, and so when he tried to kill me...it killed him instead."

Dudley stared at his cousin with a mixture of confusion and fear. This killer tried to kill him as a baby? It made no sense that he would survive. But there was something else that confused him even more. "Why was he brought up again if he died already?"

"He's back," Harry said simply, and Dudley watched as he began to shake in fear. "He came back while I was at school last year. One of his followers took the place of one of our professors and made it possible."

The fact that the man who killed Harry's parents came back made Dudley even more fearful, but this time it was for his cousin and not himself. "Is he going to try to kill you?"

"It wouldn't be the first time," Harry said with a shrug. "Wouldn't even be the second time. I fought him my first and second years at Hogwarts. First he acted through a professor, and the second he acted through a diary."

Dudley tried to imagine life through Harry's shoes for the first time. He imagined growing up in a family who hated him. They lockd him in a closet, starved him, made him do more house work than even Petunia did, and treated him like trash. They even encouraged him to pick fights with Harry. Before all of that, though, an evil wizard tried to kill him. That wizard orphaned Harry. Then his parents tried to keep Harry from being who he truly was - a wizard. His first two years at that school of his he had to fight off that same man who tried to kill him as a baby, and then that past year the man came back for good and then dementors were sent after him and he didn't know why. Harry could only assume it was Voldemort. His cousin had lived a very sad life.

The pair of them sat in silence for the better part of ten minutes before Dudley spoke. "I...I never knew all of these things. I had no idea it was just as bad for you in your world as it was for you here. Worse, actually. We never tried to kill you. Did everything else, though."

"Don't start all of this now, Dudley. Fourteen years I've lived with you and you guys never once took pity or treated me kindly. Nothing changed except you learned a few things."

Again, Dudley was left speechless with Harry's comment. Instead of fighting for words he changed the course of the conversation. "I don't understand how you killed that man as a baby. I mean, you were just a baby. Your parents couldn't even stop him. What makes you so different?"

"I wish I knew."

"If he just came back, how did you fight him in your first two years?"

Harry went off on a long tale that took Dudley on a journey through Harry's first two years at Hogwarts. Dudley learned of all the things Harry had done at school. He learned about the different teachers and students who played a part in his fighting. An eleven year old faced one of the darkest wizards the same way he had only ten years prior, and then he did it again the next year and he also fought a giant snake who could kill when looking into somebody's eyes. He learned about the godfather that he had heard his parents speaking about. He was a convicted murderer, yes, but Harry and his friends had found out the truth and knew his godfather was innocent even if nobody else knew. He fought hundreds of dementors that year and saved his own life as well as his godfathers. He spoke about how somebody had illegally signed him up for a huge tournament that could have ended in his death. He was too young to participate but kept up with the older kids and was declared the winner. When Harry got to that part in his story, Dudley noticed the hesitation to keep going, and once he did he started talking about how him and Cedric (who Dudley learned was also a part of this tournament) had been transported to a graveyard where Cedric had been killed on the spot despite him being just an innocent person who had no part in the war that had been fought all those years ago. Cedric had been killed and Harry was forced to stand against the evil wizard. Harry stopped talking for a long moment before mentioning that on that night he also saw his parents. He explained in very simple turns that the wands were basically brothers so instead of either Harry or Voldemort harming each other the wands themselves dueled and the recent spells cast by it were shown, and so the longer it went on the more ghost-like beings came from the wand, and his parents were two of them.

Dudley was struggling to keep in his shock. Everything that Harry had described sounded so utterly terrifying. He learned that Harry was one of the most important wizards in his world. He was the one in most danger of Voldemort. "But he's scared of Dumbledore, the headmaster. Dumbledore is the only wizard Voldemort had ever truly feared," Harry had said when Dudley asked him if he would be the who had to fight him again. "As long as Dumbledore's around we'll all be safe."

"No offense but it doesn't seem as if you were too safe while he was around."

"Dumbledore is the greatest wizard of our time," Harry said defensively. "As long as Dumbledore's around I'm safe. Or as safe as I could be with a dark wizard after me. Dumbledore is always around to save the day. The man impersonating our professor tried to get me last year, but Dumbledore came in and saved me before anything were to happen."

Dudley decided against speaking out against this Dumbledore again seeing as how much his cousin obviously respected the man. Instead he did something he never thought he would do. "I'm...I'm sorry, Harry. I mean we never treated you right, and then you were only going off to fight at your school with your kind...and not everybody there seems to like you much at all anyways. That guy, Malkboy, sounds a bit like...well, a bit like me."

"His name is Malfoy," Harry corrected quietly. "You guys are scared of me. Your parents never wanted a wizard living in their home. They just wanted me to somehow turn out normal like you lot. I reckon if I wasn't a wizard things would have turned out quite differently."

He can't explain why that angered him, but Dudley seemed to get very upset over it. It sounded almost like Harry was blaming himself for everything. "If you weren't a wizard you'd be dead right now. That Voldemort guy would have been able to kill you if you weren't magical I imagine," he said shortly. "We never should have treated you the way we have."

Harry seemed to age thirty years just by that sentence. His shoulders slumped and he lowered his head with his eyes shut. "Why are you here, Dudley?" he asked tiredly. "I can't imagine you being attacked because of me makes you want to change the way you view me."

"I didn't know what was going on. I wasn't sure if maybe you were wanted by the law for something, or if you did something wrong. I wanted to understand why that happened that night. I wasn't here to apologize, but hearing everything you went through makes me feel sorry," Dudley explained. "I guess that's also another reason to apologize. I came in here to make sure that I would be okay instead of even wondering how it was affecting you. Those dementor things...you seem to have a lot of history with those. Why couldn't I see them?"

"Muggles can't see dementors. Non-magic folk, I mean."

"They're frightening. You've had to fight them off a lot. I can't imagine doing that. I felt so hopeless when we were attacked. I felt like nothing would ever make me want to smile. It was miserable. I don't think I'd be able to fight them if I were a wizard."

"I thought the same thing when I encountered my first one. I learned to protect myself from them, but my spell was too weak the first time I fought those hundreds of dementors. I was able to do it the second time after we went back in time, though," Harry said, then suddenly sat straight up and looked directly at Dudley. "What was it, exactly, that you were thinking about when the dementor attacked you? Did you hear anything?"

Dudley felt himself pale. He couldn't imagine how Harry knew he had heard anything, unless maybe that was something that happened to everybody when attacked by a dementor. If that was the case, then he wondered what Harry heard or thought about. Was it something from living with them? Was it from one of the times he fought Voldemort? Was it an irrational fear that everybody had? He realized he was thinking too much about what Harry might have thought about instead of answering the question for himself, but it was a scary thing to answer. Saying it out loud would probably make things worse. He figured he owed it to Harry, though, since he came in there asking Harry about some of the worst moments of his life. "I heard a lot of yelling," he said quietly. "It was that night that giant man came to give you that letter of yours. Dad was yelling at him to get out, and that giant was yelling even louder, and I can remember getting that tail. It was horrifying. What do you hear? What happens to you?"

Harry smiled sheepishly at the mention of the giant. "That's Hagrid. He's one of my best friends. He's not scary at all unless you insult someone he cares deeply about," he said, and then the smile went away and he looked down at the bed sheets. "I hear screaming. It's a woman. It's my mother, the night she was murdered. I can't remember many specific things since I was so young, but sometimes I still dream about that green light. That's the killing curse that I survived. There's a curse in the wizarding world that kills a person instantly and only once has it ever failed, and that was me. That's what killed Cedric, and my parents."

"You imagine your parents deaths? Oh, gosh, Harry, I'm sure even mum and dad would admit that's a terrible thing to experience," Dudley said, wide-eyed.

"I expect your parents would be happy to hear of that," Harry snapped, making Dudley flinch and then Harry sighed. Of course Dudley was still going to be scared of him even though there wasn't any reason to. Unless he was scared simply because he was a wizard. Unfortunately, Harry was able to agree it was a big scary. "Sorry, Dudley. Didn't mean to snap like that. Your parents just aren't all that fond of me."

"Maybe I could change their minds," Dudley said, sounding stupid even to himself. "They tend to agree with everything I say, as you know. Maybe if I try to tell them that-"

"With how much they hate me I think you'd only get yourself in trouble," Harry interrupted, shaking his head slightly. "I'm used to it, you know. Plus I think I'm leaving here soon anyways. I got a trial, you see, for using that spell to stop the dementors. The wizard government don't find me as trustworthy as Dumbledore. They don't believe Voldemort is back and want to do anything they could to keep me from proving them wrong. Besides, only gotta be here for two more summers, and I'll be on my own. If I'm expelled, well, not much we can do about it. I wouldn't have a wand so I wouldn't be much of a threat to your parents. Maybe things would fix on their own."

Dudley felt an overwhelming love for his cousin the way he should have felt about him their entire life. He never pictured himself feeling this protective over the boy. "Still, maybe I can convince them that you saved me...Would the dementors have killed me?"

Harry shook his head. "They'd do much worse. They'd suck out your soul."

"You saved my life, then. That must count for something to mum and dad if they knew."

"I think they do know, but would rather focus on the fact that your life wouldn't need saving if it weren't for me," Harry said. "I'm sorry for that, by the way. You wouldn't have been attacked if I wasn't there. It's me they wanted."

"That isn't your fault. After all, you're just a kid just like me. It was that Voldemort guy's fault."

Harry smiled a bitter smile. "It doesn't matter who's fault it is. I'm the Boy-Who-Lived. I'm famous in the wizarding world, have I mentioned? Everybody knows my name. The saviour of the wizarding world. They all knew my story when I first went to Hogwarts while I was still learning my story myself. Thought everybody was mad when they thanked me or shook my hand when I didn't even know their name."

"Odd to imagine you famous, it is. They don't seem to take good care of famous folk in your world. I imagine you'd have bodyguards surrounding you any time you left the house if this all happened here." They sat in a comfortable silence for a few minutes after that before Dudley added, "I'd like things to change between us. At least if that's okay with you. I don't wanna continue on as we have all our lives. We're cousins. Maybe I should start acting the part."

Harry studied him for a long moment after he finished speaking. Dudley felt uncomfortable under his stare but didn't look away. From what Harry had told him about his time at Hogwarts it didn't seem like there were many people he could trust. Dudley had given him absolutely no reason to trust him so if Harry staring at him and judging him with his eyes were to prove something to him then so be it. After a while, Harry gave a sort of nod to himself and held out his hand to shake. "I think I'll start acting the part as well."

His cousin's response sure did stun Dudley for a moment, but then he reached out and shook Harry's hand properly for the first time in his life and he smiled. Harry smiled back, and even though the smile didn't reach his eyes he couldn't deny that Harry looked better then than he had all summer. This was his younger cousin, Dudley realized. Of course he had always known he was about a month older than him, but it never fully sunk in until that moment as well as the fact that they are cousins. Their mothers were sisters, after all. The reality of it all sunk in and Dudley couldn't say he regretted anything more than the way he had treated Harry all of their life. "Why don't you come to my room and I can teach you how to play a few games on my computer? Do they have those in your world?"

"We tend to stray away from anything like that," Harry said, shaking his head. "But I think I'd like to give it a go, thanks."


End file.
